Our refund system is rigged to allow fraud. They send out refunds before they receive any W-2’s from a third party. Not even the multiple refunds to bank accounts triggers a response. The system is broken and needs to be fixed.
Congress is to blame.

While what she did was wrong and she should go to prison, I think that this sentence is ridiculous. There are murderers and rapists that get out of jail, why should someone who stole face a stiffer penalty? (Just my opinion)

This woman is a special kind of thief that is very difficult to ferret out of the background noise of the tax system.

When you have a situation like that you up the penalty mostly to keep honest people honest.

Based on experience (catching such folks by the thousands it turned out) I am thinking of writing a 'how to do it' book ~ it will describe how to create a fake employee and reap the rewards of modest tax refunds, even EITC!

I will not advise anyone to do this ~ but I fully expect to have some IRS guys want to interview me ~ and I, of course, will want to interview them using Hanns-Joachim Gottlob Scharff's proven technique. Even Colonel Kanatzhan (Kanat) Alibekov told me that I was very, very good ~ among the best he'd ever encountered.

While what she did was wrong and she should go to prison, I think that this sentence is ridiculous. There are murderers and rapists that get out of jail, why should someone who stole face a stiffer penalty? (Just my opinion)

This was not her sentence, it was what a reporter says she "faces." The reporter probably got that number by taking every crime she is charged with and adding up the maximum sentence for each. Federal sentencing guidelines don't actually work that way. Realistically, she will probably get 20-25 years.

She did not just steal once. This was a long, calculating process. She stole from all of us. At least SOME “violent criminals” had a moment of loss of control, which in the end caused harm, and landed them in prison, but they were not dong their crime over and over for months or years on end. I think it is fair that she received such a long sentence.

Muawiyah, either you didn’t read the article, or you are posting to the wrong thread. The lady who committed this fraud didn’t create fake employees—she committed identity theft and filed 2000 individual returns in order to collect the refunds using fake ID.

Your original concern was that it'd be less costly with less risk to just give yourself a dividend than to create a fake employee ~ after all, there are all the deductions for FICA, withholding, insurance, health care, state taxes, city taxes, etc.

This woman is an example of what i was discussing ~ they just create a fake person that looks real for a second to the IRS computers, and they get REFUNDS ~ they, themselves, never pay the government a dime!

REFERENCE-——Treasury Dept investigators estimate another $21 billion could make its way to ID thieves’ pockets over the next five years. The IRS is detecting far fewer fraudulent tax refund claims than actually occur, according to a govt audit that warned the widespread problem could undermine public trust in the U.S. tax system.

Although the IRS detected about 940,000 fraudulent returns for last year claiming $6.5 billion in refunds, there were potentially another 1.5 million undetected cases of thieves seeking refunds after assuming the identity of a dead person, child or someone else who normally wouldn’t file a tax return.

In just one example, investigators found a single address in Lansing, Mich, was used to file 2,137 separate tax returns. The IRS issued more than $3.3 million in refunds to that address.

Florida, is the epicenter of the identity theft crisis (a state overrun with latinos-—many of whom are Cuban-—who are also involved in massive Medicare/Aid fraud). Just three addresses in Florida filed more than 500 returns totaling more than $1 million in refunds for each address.......Florida was also the scene of a massive subprime mtge scam-—with latinos colluding to bilk millions-—leaving Americans holding the bag.

In another troubling scenario, hundreds of refunds were deposited into the same bank account—a red flag for investigators searching for ID thieves— who may be filing for refunds for multiple people. In one instance, the IRS deposited 590 refunds totaling more than $900,000 into one account.

One or more employees of the IRS who wrote or implemented policies that let this kind of fraud happen should be in adjacent cells with her. Someone somewhere in the IRS had to come up with the idea that they “should go ahead and send the checks and we will verify later”.

Congress did that ~ the IRS employees know how to catch this stuff but it also delays other refunds to honest taxpayers.

Hence my book on how to do this ~ I think it could encourage enough tens of thousands of tax cheats to think they could get away with it and actually get Congress to GIT OUT THE WAY and let the collections people do their job.

Something about seeing the whole tally that can get your attention. Of course it also has its purpose. As somebody else point out elsewhere, it could be 351 counts with a one year sentence...the could run concurrently or consecutively.

Where it really comes into play is on appeals where some counts may be overturned and others stand, you need an overall tally to deduct from.

She had fake W-2s. You can make them with the standard taxpackages used to file your taxes. Every item you need to create something that looks like an employer created it is readily available at Staples.

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